|
| |
Laurence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
Historians of civilization when they come to the eighteenth century almost
always devote most space to France. The Age of Enlightenment is usually
considered the period in which French thought dominated European culture. This
is certainly true in a quantitative sense: Voltaire or Diderot must have been
read by the greatest number of people, and we spontaneously think of
eighteenth-century painting as represented by Boucher, Fragonard, or, at the
best, Chardin — this in spite of the fact that the Tiepolos, father and son,
are greater painters. As philosophers the French philosophes seem pretty
thin today, essentially popularizers. Their foundations go back to the
seventeenth century, and not primarily to the Frenchman Descartes but to the
Englishmen Locke and Newton.
Similarly with the novel. Nothing would appear in France to compare with the
great English novels of the eighteenth century until Choderlos de Laclos’s
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which was not an expression of the Age of
Enlightenment, but its obituary.
Modern taste, corrupted by the undemanding narratives of television, the
movies, and commercial fiction, may find Fielding, Smollett, and especially
Richardson hard to read, but Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy retains a
wide measure of popularity. It may not be as popular today as David
Copperfield, but it is certainly more popular than most other classic
English fiction or than those favorites of our grandparents, Vanity Fair
and Ivanhoe.
Dozens of books have been called “the first modern novel.” As expressions
of the modern sensibility of alienation, the best claimants are doubtless the
novels of Laclos and Stendhal; but in a most important way Tristram Shandy
is modern, so modern that a very long time would elapse before anything else
like it would appear.
If Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi can be called a play which assumes
that the characters are performing not outside the mind but within it,
Tristram Shandy is a drama of the mind itself.
It is a bucolic — rather, a provincial-town — comedy. It has often been
pointed out that it is the very distillate of life in York — still the regional
capital that it had been in the Middle Ages, with its own circle of
intellectuals, its own “power structure,” its own coffee houses and magazines,
and its own cultural originality and autonomy. As such, the novel is a mirror of
the greater London or Paris — the great reflected in the little, and more
sharply refined, as in a reducing glass. But it is more than this. It is, as
Sterne said it was, in the face of hostile critics who have gone on to this very
day accusing him of being a lewd and neurotic country clergyman, indeed a
philosophical and moral work, and one of very considerable profundity.
As Sterne saw the workings of the mind, it functioned according to the
philosophy of Locke as modified by the atomism of Newton. There was nothing in
the mind that was not first in sensation, and each primitive sensation was a
kind of atom. The sensations entered the mind through the senses and were
combined to reach ever-ascending levels of complexity and abstraction. If this
process could only be as orderly as the sorting mechanism of the mind itself,
what would result would be a universe of strictly deductive logic, a kind of
immense and even more closely structured Euclid’s Elements or Aquinas’s
Summa Contra Gentiles.
But the atoms of experience, the primitive sense data, do not occur at the
option of the mind; nor, since the mind is ultimately itself formed of its own
material, is the process so logically efficient. In fact, it is all
extraordinarily random. Sensation is fed to us in the most helter-skelter
fashion. At the lower levels of mental activity we are at the mercy of the
chances of association. We may well be even at the highest levels, even though
we do not realize it. This is an elementary, psychologistic, definition of
comedy itself. It is certainly very funny, the way we put together our
individual pictures of the universe, and the way we go through the experience we
call “experience,” and the way we emerge at the end.
Sterne’s contribution, and it is a very important one to psychology and
epistemology, is the realization that the essence of the comedy of epistemology,
the profound humor of what we call knowledge of reality, is the ungovernable
disorder of Time. If Locke’s sense data came to us marching one-two-three-four
through our sense organs into our brains, as Newton’s atoms move in matter or
his planets go around the sun, Time would be simple, linear, and comprehensible
— but of course, they do not. We cannot measure experience by looking at the
clock. Later philosophers were to distinguish something they call Organic Time;
but this is a knowledge of process far more orderly than the comic disorder of
Sterne’s narrative.
Joseph Conrad’s favorite narrator, Marlow, tells his tales with the natural
switching and shifting of time of someone telling a story as it occurs to willed
memory. In Proust, time dissolves and slows. Even the narrator, Marcel, is a
character in a brain that is constantly trying to return the temporal process to
its sources. James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in a day. Finnegans
Wake takes place in a single troubled dream, and all of Joyce’s experience
is reflected and refracted in the brief circuits of a few revolving mirrors and
prisms. But most of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. occur
before he has any opinions, and a third before he has any life. He isn’t born
until far on in the book. Chapter after chapter goes by while the author
struggles helplessly, in an inconsequential sequence in the narrative, to get
two characters downstairs.
It was in discussing Sterne that Coleridge elaborated his famous definition
of humor as the juxtaposition of the immense and important and the trivial and
tiny in the real, in that reality which is always overshadowed by the infinite.
Although he was offended, or at least said he was, by Sterne’s bawdry, he was
well aware of its significance.
One famous and often analyzed passage is a case in point. It is a sentimental
set piece far more effective than almost anything in the novels of Richardson or
the paintings of Greuze, and it ends with mockery. Tristram is on his way by
coach to Moulins and encounters the beautiful, blind, and brokenhearted Maria
“sitting upon a bank, playing her vespers upon her pipe, with her little goat
beside her,” driven mad with sorrow. Overcome with sentiment, Tristram stops
the coach and seats himself beside the girl.
Maria look’d wistfully for some time at me, and then at her goat—and
then at me—and then at her goat again, and so on, alternately—“Well,
Maria, said I softly—What resemblance do you find?”
All through this touching narrative, so full of melancholy, we know that
Tristram has been getting sexually excited unbeknown to himself, and the climax
of the excitement is the sharp realization of the absurdity of the act of
procreation. Small wonder Coleridge picked this passage. He was acutely aware of
the ridiculousness of “coming to be and passing away.” Coleridge’s private
notebooks contain descriptions in the language of “Kubla Khan” of the colors
and perfumes of his morning’s chamber pot. Tristram’s father’s discourse on the
white bear is a thoroughly modern poem on the absurdity of our knowledge of the
world:
CHAPTER XLIII
My father took a single turn across the room, then sat down and finished
the chapter.
The verbs auxiliary we are concerned in here,
continued my father, are, am; was; have; had;
do; did; make; made; suffer; shall;
should; will; would; can; could; owe;
ought; used; or is wont.—And these varied with
tenses, present, past, future, and conjugated with the
verb see,—or with these questions added to them;—Is it? Was
it? Will it be? Would it be? May it be? Might it be? And these again put
negatively, Is it not? Was it not? Ought it not?—Or affirmatively,—It is; It was; It ought to be. Or chronologically,—Has it been always? Lately? How long ago?—Or hypothetically,—If it was? If it was not? What would follow?—If the French
should beat the English? If the Sun go out of the Zodiac?
Now, by the right use and application of these,
continued my father, in which a child’s memory should be exercised, there is
no one idea can enter his brain how barren soever, but a magazine of
conceptions and conclusions may be drawn forth from it.—Didst thou ever
see a white bear? cried my father, turning his head round to Trim, who stood
at the back of his chair:—No, an’ please your honour, replied the
corporal.—But thou could’st discourse about one, Trim, said my father, in
case of need?—How is it possible, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, if the
corporal never saw one?—’Tis the fact I want, replied my father,—and
the possibility of it is as follows.
A white bear! Very well. Have I ever seen
one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have
seen one? Or can I ever see one?
Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I
imagine it?)
If I should see a white bear, what should I say?
If I should never see a white bear, what then?
If I never have, can, must or shall see a white
bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted?—described? Have I never dreamed of one?
Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or
sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave?
How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough?
Smooth?
—Is the white bear worth seeing?—
—Is there no sin in it?—
Is it better than a black one?
There is no essential difference between the circumstantial picture of the
human condition in Sterne and that in the most anguished Existentialist, except
that Sterne’s portrayal is far more elaborate and accurate, and he thinks it’s
funny. There is an important distinction here, that between comedy and humor.
There is nothing funny about the final aesthetic experience we get from
Machiavelli’s Mandragola or Ben Jonson’s Volpone, any more than
there is in the one we get from No Exit. There is an immense amount of
funny business along the way in the two older plays; but all three are comedies,
and their look into chaos is bleak.
There is all sorts of pathos along the way in Tristram Shandy — the
saddest the death of Le Fever, where Sterne unquestionably surpasses Richardson
or even Fielding, that great anti-sentimentalist. But Sterne, looking out like
the Prince of the Fallen Angels over the chaos of the world, does what Satan
could never do: he laughs, as Buddha laughed long before him at the vision of
the compound infinitudes of universes in the Lankavatara Sutra. Certainly
most people would think the conjunction of Sterne and Buddha as incongruous as
anything in the novels of one or the sermons of the other; but the conclusion of
the English country clergyman and provincial philosophe was the same as
that of the founder of a world religion: an all-suffering compassion.
That is precisely what Sterne says is the message of Tristram Shandy.
It is the constantly reiterated theme of his now-unread sermons, which were
unique in a time when the pulpit in England was not distinguished for the
identification of the clergy with the sufferings and the absurdities of the
lives of the humble.
This essay is from Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (copyright 1968
Kenneth Rexroth). Reproduced here by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited are both in print and available from New Directions. Do yourself a favor and get
them.
[Other “Classics Revisited” essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
| |
|